Measuring employee effectiveness is an important part of any managerial function in a business. The criteria on which employees are measured typically depend on the specific work environment. In the contact center or call center context, the criteria may comprise a number of key performance indicators (“KPIs”) that are frequently used to measure an agent's work performance.
In some instances, performance metrics may be readily selected and accurately measure the agent's performance. For example, agents engaged in telemarketing sales or soliciting donations may have their performance measured by the dollar amount of sales or donations that they obtain. Tracking an aggregate dollar amount is relatively easy and may provide a suitable absolute indicator of an agent's performance.
In many cases, the parameters used to measure an agent's performance are not necessarily based on their effectiveness in measuring agent performance, but based on the ease in which the parameters can be obtained and processed. For example, using a dollar amount would not effectively measure agents that provide customer service, since no purchases or donations are received. In this case, using the duration that an agent is involved on a call can be easily and precisely measured. The call duration includes the time the agent was initially connected until the time the agent was disconnected. However, the call duration does not necessarily inform management how effective an agent performs a particular task. For example, it would appear desirable for such an agent to have very short calls, as this would allow the agent to handle more calls. In this case, the agent keeping calls as short as possible with callers may not satisfactory resolve the callers' issues and these callers may be forced to call back. This can result in increased customer dissatisfaction and actually cause more time to be involved cumulatively by the agents. This illustrates how an agent may strive to increase their performance based on maximizing a measured performance parameter that may not accurately measure the agent's performance.
It may be difficult for management to measure whether customer issues are actually resolved during a call, but it may be easy to measure the duration of the call. Therefore, there may be a temptation by management to measure agents based on their call duration, even though that performance metric is not directly related to measuring whether customer issues are resolved in an efficient manner.
Once an appropriate metric is determined for measuring agent performance, an agent having poor performance may complain that this is due to the particular list of numbers associated with a particular group of customers or prospects that are assigned to the agent. It is possible that agents working on different campaigns, or different calling lists from the same campaign, may reflect different demographics that intrinsically impact each agent's performance. For example, agents soliciting political donations for a particular political party may encounter different results when assigned to call individuals from certain states. Residents from a certain state or city may be more likely affiliated with a particular political party and thus more or less willing to provide a donation. An agent may rightfully argue that this impacted their performance and had they been assigned a different state, their performance would have been better. Further, the agent may argue it is inappropriate to compare their performance with another agent who was assigned calls made to a different state or city, between agents handling calls made on the weekday versus weekend, or some other times (e.g., prime time versus non-prime time, however that is defined). Further, if the agents are split among handling different campaigns, it may be difficult to compare e.g., a first agent's performance in a calling campaign directed to soliciting political donations with a second agent's performance in a calling campaign soliciting religious donations. In another example, it may be difficult to compare agents attempting to collect on an automobile loan with agents attempting to collect on a credit card debt.
Addressing agent performance evaluation requires systems and methods that can properly detect when an agent is performing above (or below) expectations independent of the campaign type and the telephone numbers of the prospects/customers assigned to that agent, thus ensuring that the performance measurement is not due to intrinsic variations of the calling list or some other external factor. In other words, comparing agent performance requires a common baseline among the agents being evaluated that eliminates such factors. That is to say, while agents cannot control if they reach a called party, they may be able to impact the outcome of the call. Once such externals factors are equalized between agents, then differences in the outcomes of the calls may be attributed to the agent's skill. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure herein is presented.